A sensible plan to rate colleges: Editorial

The federal government provides $150 billion a year in financial aid to college students, so it makes perfect sense to measure results.

President Barack Obama Friday speaks at an event at Lackawanna College in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Obama is on his second day of a bus tour of New York and Pennsylvania to discuss his plan to make college more affordable, tackle rising costs, and improve value for students and their families.Photo by Jessica Kourkounis/Getty Images

In a speech Thursday in Syracuse, N.Y., President Obama offered up one fact that speaks volumes about what has gone wrong with higher education: During the past three decades, the average price of a four-year degree at a public university has risen by 250 percent, while average family income has risen by just 16 percent.

People are still going to college, in ever greater numbers. Because even at today’s prices, a degree remains the key to economic success. The jobless rate among college graduates is less than 4 percent today, and never exceeded 5.1 percent during the depth of the recession. Incomes of college graduates are about 80 percent higher than those of high school graduates.

So families are making deeper sacrifices to get their children through. And students are borrowing more heavily, with the average debt ballooning to $27,000.

Obama now proposes to help families navigate this challenge by providing scorecards that would rank colleges, and by rewarding those colleges that produce the best results. The ratings, which he said would be ready by 2015, will include measures such as average tuition, the share of low-income students they enroll, graduation rates, average debt and even average income after graduation.

Some of this information is available today in scattered places, but Obama would put it under one roof, with easily accessible software. And average incomes of graduates are not currently available to the public.

The idea behind the rating system is sound. It will help families make smart choices with one of the biggest investments of their lives. And it will give colleges new incentive to measure up.

Like any tool, this one could be misused. A college that trains teachers is likely to report lower incomes than one offering business degrees. A low graduation rate may reflect an ambitious attempt to recruit students with lower incomes, who tend to drop out more often. And it will be important for the ratings system to show trends, not just static numbers.

Predictably, colleges are nervous about facing such scrutiny. And some Republicans oppose a larger role for the federal government on ideological grounds.

“This is a slippery slope,” says Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). “The U.S. did not create the best higher education system in the world by using standards set by Washington bureaucrats.”

It’s all about accountability. The federal government provides $150 billion a year in financial aid to college students, so it makes perfect sense to measure results. In fact, the new focus on cost and performance is a refreshing change after months of talk about interest rates alone.

Rubio does not dispute the need for tests and rankings in kindergarten-grade 12 schools. Applying the same principle to colleges breaks no new ideological ground. It would be a consumer tool, not a conspiracy against freedom.

Obama can build the rating system on his own without the consent of Congress. The political challenge will come in 2018, when he hopes the ratings will be linked to federal aid programs.

Obama will be gone by then, so perhaps Republicans will have stopped trying to repeal “Obamacare” and will have some time to examine the idea on its merits. One can dream.